First Day and YALSA 101

Today was the first real day for me. I got to the conference around noon, picked up my large (ugly!) orange bag (it looks like it could be a flotation device, or used to ward off a hunting incident) with all the conference information in it, and my badge, then went for lunch with Dave and a friend of his from KCLS. Later, after checking email and wandering the floor a bit, I stopped by the YALSA 101 presentation.

The session was presented by the YALSA officers, who told us about ways that we could get involved with YALSA, through committees and publications. We also learned about Teen Read Week, Teen Tech Week and the YALSA Literature Symposium coming up in November.

It turns out that YALSA is a big presence on the web, utilizing twitter, blog, MySpace, Facebook, Ning and a few other sites to connect with members. A new one I hadn't heard of is called Friend Feed and can be used to gather all of your social networking sites onto one page, and integrated into a Google page or Facebook. In this way, you can keep track of what all of your friends are doing from the same page, regardless of what social networking medium they use. I will have to check it out.

I also found out about an effort called Support Teen Literacy Day. I am still a little unsure how the program works, but I intend to find out more. What I gathered from the talk was that publishers donate books and they are given to teens who are in the hospital with long term illness.

After the 101 class I, and most of the other attendees went to Morton's for the YALSA happy hour. I was interviewed along with another librarian about our zine collection and the work we do with teens in relation to zines. That may end up as a pod cast on the YALSA site. Dave also met up with me there and we made some new acquaintances--Janine from the iSchool (UW) was one. She had a lot of good information about YALSA committees and book lists.

I ended the night having dinner with one of my cohort today that I didn't know would be here until she texted me earlier today to say she was coming from Portland. She is an academic librarian, so our paths probably won't cross often at the conference, but I hope we will get to hang out at least once more.